Day: May 25, 2014

Hi readers, today I want to talk about the things that make a story come to life…..characters! How do we create characters? How do we make them come alive? It’s not as simple as you think. Characters are more than names on a page. They’re living, breathing souls, at least that’s the impression you need to make.

There are two types of characters: Major and Minor. The major characters are obviously the main characters in a story, and are the ones that need detailed personalities. The minor characters are just there to help your main guys along, and most of the time they only need very little description.

There are usually more minor characters than major ones, but that’s not always the case. In my novel the Restoring there are a lot of major characters, and minor characters only pop up every now and then, usually to add description to a scene, or to give some quick advice for one of my main men or women.

One of the biggest problems new writers have, and what I have gone through as well, is weak major characters. It’s hard to define when a character is memorable or just a person no one cares about. Personally, I hate characters that are completely dumb. The ones that make the readers roll their eyes and tell them to get on with it and figure it out already 🙂

Characters are real people as well, and if you’ve read my post on the perfect story, you will find that they have to show some vulnerability or else no one will care for them. Major characters need a unique personality and a unique objective, just like real people, and there just has to be something about them. I can’t explain it, but you know it when you read it, or see it.

This has gotten me thinking. When I read books with amazing characters, I sometimes think, why can’t I be like that guy? Creating characters shouldn’t be limited to writing!

We need to also make ourselves and others become those great characters in our favourite books. The ones that are memorable and make an impact, and the only way to do that is to reflect the greatest character of all….Jesus Christ!

When our characters show who Jesus is, that’s when they’re memorable, at least to me anyway. When I look at someone and can see Jesus, that’s when I remember them. If you want to reflect God’s heart in your writing, or in anything, create, or be, that memorable character.

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

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